ROOTS & BRANCHES

For a video advertisement that runs 30 seconds, the reviews from the “Twitterverse” were lengthy and seem to be unanimous: Ancestry’s Canadian subsidiary laid an enormous egg in putting out an ad titled “Inseparable” showing an antebellum interracial couple planning to flee north.

Because … well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out, realizing at the outset that that an older white guy, despite pretensions toward the progressive, is less well equipped than others to overcome my racial blind spots.

A lot about the ad is left intentionally vague but the plot is this: A black woman named Abigail and white man run into an alley where he dangles what looks like a wedding ring in front of her and says there’s a place to the north across the border to which they can escape together.

After he asks, “Will you leave with me?” there’s a fade to black with the words “Only you can keep the story going” and a marriage certificate and photo of the two of them flashes briefly.

The reactions were quick and fierce and Ancestry almost as quickly pulled the ad and apologized. Here’s a sampling of the reactions and my reactions to those reactions:

• One social media post talked about the man in the ad as an “enslaver,” which is kind of strange because if that was his status, then why would he be trying to escape with an enslaved woman?
• Another off-the-rails tweeter talked about anti-miscegenation attitudes being enforced in the Canada by the Ku Klux Klan (presumably to rebut there being any interracial relationships such as this one?) … which makes no sense in context since the ad is clearly before the American Civil War and the Klan arose after the war as a way of restoring white supremacy.
• A headline screamed “Ancestry pulls ad that appears to romanticize slavery after backlash.” Hmmm …the protagonists are romanticizing enslavement so much that—uh, they’re fleeing it.

More cogent criticisms, to my mind, are that the ad follows the narrative of a “white savior” and soft-peddles the reality of power imbalance in any interracial relationship of the time.

But for the plot of the ad to be called “ahistorical” (as it was in a Washington Post column) seems patronizing, as if to say such a consensual interracial romance never happened, as unlikely and rare as it might have been.

More realistic and more in line with the truth of enslavement would be to show a brutal rape by an enslaver. I’m just having trouble coming up with the “fade to black” tagline that would accompany it.